improve your mind with entertaining fiction (whoda thought?)
Discover how entertaining fiction can boost your mind with this curated list of engaging books. Improve cognitive skills while enjoying great reads—whoda thought?
Book
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
by Ernest Hemingway
Before he gained wide fame as a novelist, Ernest Hemingway established his literary reputation with his short stories. This collection, The Short Stories, originally published …
Book
White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The blockbuster debut novel from "a preternaturally gifted" writer (The New York Times) and author of On Beauty and Swing Time—set against …
Book
The Stranger
by Albert Camus
With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The Stranger—Camus's masterpiece—gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an …
Book
Everything Is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may …
Book
The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction
by Henry James
To read a story by Henry James is to enter a fully realized world unlike any other—a rich, perfectly crafted domain of vivid language and …
Book
In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
Set during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republica in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story the Mirabal sisters, three …
Book
The Lover
by Marguerite Duras
A modern classic and international bestseller with more than one million copies in print, The Lover has been celebrated by critics and readers across the …
Book
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway is the portrait of a single day in a woman's life.
Book
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
James Joyce's coming-of-age story, a tour de force of style and technique The first, shortest, and most approachable of James Joyce’s novels, A Portrait of …
Book
Gertrude and Claudius
by John Updike
Gertrude and Claudius are the “villains” of Hamlet: he the killer of Hamlet’s father and usurper of the Danish throne; she his lusty consort, who …
Book
Equus
by Peter Shaffer
Story of a psychiatrist who attempts to treat a young man who has a pathological fascination with horses
Book
You've Got to Read This
by Ron Hansen
Thirty-four of America's most distinguished fiction writers--including Oscar Hijuelos, John Irving, and Joyce Carol Oates--introduce the short stories that inspired them most.
Book
Notes from the Underground, and The Gambler
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from the Underground (1864) is one of the most profound works of nineteenth-century literature. A probing, speculative book, often regarded as a forerunner of …